JFK Theory: John Birch Society
Harry Dean was an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1962 he infiltrated the John Birch Society. He later reported that leading members of the society, including John Rousselot and Edwin Walker, hired two gunman, Eladio del Valle and Loran Hall, to kill President John F. Kennedy.
In his book JFK: The Second Plot, Matthew Smith has argued that the John Birch Society may have joined forces with a group of Texas oil millionaires to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
Haroldson L. Hunt and Clint Murchison were both members who provided the John Birch Society with funding. Both were bitter opponents of Kennedy but had good relationships with Lyndon B. Johnson.
(M1) Wanted for Treason, a handbill published by supporters of the John Birch Society and handed out in Dallas before President John F. Kennedy arrived on his visit (November, 1963)
1. Betraying the Constitution (which he swore to uphold). He is turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations. He is betraying our friends (Cuba, Katanga, Portugal) and befriending our enemies (Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland).
2. He has been WRONG on innumerable issues affecting the security of the US (United Nations, Berlin Wall, Missile Removal, Cuba, Wheat deals, Test Ban Treaty, etc.).
3. He has been lax in enforcing the Communist Registration laws.
4. He has given support and encouragement to the Communist-inspired racial riots.
5. He has illegally invaded a sovereign State with federal troops.
6. He has consistently appointed Anti-Christians to Federal office. Upholds the Supreme Court in Anti-Christian rulings. Aliens and known Communists abound in Federal offices.
7. He has been caught in fantastic LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).
Why were members of the John Birch Society angry with John F. Kennedy in 1963?
(M2) Hugh Aynesworth, JFK: Breaking the News (2003)
Relying on pitifully weak evidence to elevate a jack-leg Marxist such as Lee Harvey Oswald to membership in the supposed international communist conspiracy was precisely the sort of irresponsible straw man fabrication at which the News editorial writers excelled. No self-respecting communist would have wanted himself or his movement associated with the likes of Oswald.
Behind the News' editorial's bluster, however, lurked a different truth. It wasn't political conservatism, but intolerance-outright knee-jerk hostility to any opposing view-that characterized the thought of Ted Dealey and his fellow believers on the right. It was this brand of extremism that was discredited in Dallas by the events of November 22nd.
Fear for their own safety gripped some of the anti-communist crusaders after the shootings, possibly for good reason. Larry Schmidt and Bernard Weissman left town, the dust of The American Fact-Finding Committee settling to earth in their wake. General Walker grabbed a plane for Shreveport, Louisiana, where he hunkered down for several days.
Why does Hugh Aynesworth believe some right-wingers like General Edwin Walker might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
(M3) W. R. Morris, The Men Behind the Guns (1975)
Harry Dean, an ex-employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, has marble-hard proof that Republican Congressman John Rousselot from California's 26th Congressional District, and former Army General Edwin A. Walker of Dallas, engineered the death of John F. Kennedy. At the time, Rousselot was western director of the John Birch Society and Walker was a member of the right wing organization.
The ex-agent has an avalanche of evidence, including several tape recordings of Rousselot and Walker making threats against President Kennedy's life...
The former agent infiltrated the John Birch Society for several months and gathered firsthand information about the group's activities including plans of certain members to kill the 35th president of the United States.
He said Rousselot and Walker convinced other members of the Birch Society that a "dirty communist" tag should be placed on John Kennedy and that he should be marked for death to save the United States from "falling into Red hands."
Dean said (General Walker also was obsessed with hatred for both John and Robert Kennedy and had a "personal grudge" to settle.
"When Robert Kennedy was attorney general he ordered his aides to imprison Walker in a Federal mental institution at Springfield, Missouri, following Walker's involvement in the racial disorders in 1962 at Oxford, Mississippi." Dean said.
"In fact, Walker's clothing was torn off him and he was thrown naked into a military airplane and flown to Missouri. Robert Kennedy then leaked stories to the news media that Walker was a mental case," the ex-agent said...
"I attended many meetings of the John Birch Society prior to the assassination in 1963 and I heard details of the Kennedy kill plan being discussed each time we met," Dean said.
"I know that John Rousselot organized the murder plot and with other right-wingers financed it. General Walker ramrodded and trained the hired guns, Dean said.
"I was with a man in September 1963 when he picked up $10,000 from Rousselot. The money was taken to Mexico City to help finance the murder of Mr. Kennedy'. The assassination planning team operated out of Mexico City for several weeks before the president was shot in Dallas," Dean added
Dean said that he has been staying behind the scenes for many years and that his family has lived in constant fear.
"My wife and children have gone through hell. The life of a government undercover agent isn't the glorified one as depicted on television and in the movies.
"Now, however, I have decided to bring out the truth regardless of the price. I can't keep living with this horrible burden on my conscious. It haunts me day and night," the former agent said.
Dean said many persons will ask why he waited so long to reveal the facts about the Kennedy assassination which occurred almost 12 years ago.
"The truth of the matter is. I told my superiors about this plot when I first learned of the details, but they ignored it," Dean added.
The former agent said all the articles printed in recent weeks about the CIA and the Mafia masterminding the Kennedy murder are like the "Mother Goose and Little Red Riding Hood" stories . . entertaining, but not factual.
"The news media has been playing right into the hands of the real Kennedy killers by creating a smoke screen which continues to hide them from justice," Dean said...
"If the assassins had attempted to shoot Mr. Kennedy at the Trade Mart, they would either have been killed or captured because the whole area was crawling with federal officers who were heavily armed. Lee Harvey Oswald, working as a federal security agent, had performed his job well," Dean said.
Who does Harry Dean believe organized the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What evidence does he provide to support this claim?
(M4) Barry Goldwater, syndicated article (6th December, 1963)
In the nation’s initial shock at the assassination of President Kennedy, there was little time or opportunity for objective assessment of motivation. Immediately following the shooting, there were some misleading statements to the effect that the assassination had been engineered by the so-called ‘radical right.’ Even the U.S. Information Agency, in its broadcast to Russia, said the assassination had taken place in Dallas and described that city as a center of right-wing extremism. This broadcast was at the root of the Soviet contention that rightists were responsible for the killing and that the subsequent slaying of Oswald was part of a plot to cover up the conspiracy. Efforts to tie every group to the right of center, whether extreme or not, into the slaying have continued since, despite the long Communistic background of Lee Oswald himself. One columnist even suggested that ‘extremists’ are bent upon such acts of violence and therefore we should do away with free speech. His reasoning was that our constitutional right of free expression leads to violent dissension and intemperate acts.
Why does Barry Goldwater believe that right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society were accused of being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
(M5) William F. Buckley, syndicated article (27th November, 1963)
The opinion makers of the country... were getting ready to turn the President’s tragedy into an excuse for a program against the American Right. Within a matter of minutes nationally known radio and television commentators had started in, suggesting that the assassination had been the work of a right-wing extremist… Goodness knows what would have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald had not been apprehended, or even if he had been apprehended a day or two later. Even as it was, the disappointment was more than some could bear, and the genocidal fury here and there broke its traces.
According to William Buckley, why were the John Birch Society helped by the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald?
(M6) Billy James Hargis, Weekly Crusader (6th December, 1963)
It may be difficult for my readers to understand my fear upon hearing the right-wing accused of participation in President Kennedy’s death. May I assure you, as one who has gone through a hate campaign directed at me by the liberals and left-wing element, and having seen the degree to which they will go to destroy anyone who stands in their way, my heart told me that their hatred knew no limitations and their vengeance knows no bounds.
I know - and you know - that no true conservative in the United States would stoop to taking the law into his own hands. I know - and you know - that any man who would assassinate the President of the United States, in these days when we still have "due process of law," would not be a conservative or a patriot, but an anarchist. I hold them in the same contempt that I hold the Communists or any man who would go beyond the law to achieve an end. In my thinking, the end never justifies the means.
Conservatives stand for law. We preach obedience to the law. For that reason, we opposed the racial demonstrators who took the law into their own hands and carried on racial agitations, defying state and local laws, without regard to "due process of law." My main criticism of the racial agitators is the fact that they have no regard for the law - that they go beyond the law in an emotional period of American history to accomplish their end. No American - no minority group - no majority group - can ever justify breaking the law to accomplish their self-justified goals.
Does Billy James Hargis believe that the John Birch Society was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
(M7) Matthew Smith, JFK: The Second Plot (1992)
Another group which hated the President and which merited investigation was the extreme right-wing John Birch Society. Centred on Dallas, the group made no secret of its disdain for the Kennedy administration, in fact it advertised it well. To its members, the young President was a Communist-lover, and, in their world, that represented just about the worst thing anybody could be. In their vocabulary, to call anybody a name like that represented using real venom. That was reaching down the barrel to find the biggest of all insults. Some John Birch members were oil barons, and the oil men made up an overlapping group which, when it came to its opinions of the President, had a great deal in common with the Society. The oil industry in Texas had enjoyed huge tax concessions since 1926, when Congress had provided them as an incentive to increase much needed prospecting. The oil depletion benefits were somehow left in place to become a permanent means by which immense fortunes were amassed by those in the industry and, well aware of the anomaly, John Kennedy had declared an intention to review the oil industry revenues. There was nothing in the world which would have inflamed the oil barons more than the President interfering with the oil depletion allowance. In the minds of many, the conspirators could very easily have come from the ranks of either the John Birch Society or the oil men, which is not to say they didn't belong to both groups.
What evidence does Matthew Smith provide to suggest the John Birch Society was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy?
(M8) Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (1968)
The conspiracy to kill President Kennedy sprang from a gradually developing consensus of (mostly, though not exclusively) Texas political figures. Big Businessmen, right-wing extremists and key elements of the Dallas power elite, with the ClA in it at all levels as the connecting and cementing link.
Three levels of operation can be distinguished. At the top or control level were men consumed by ambition and the thirst for power; at the intermediate or command level, ClA men and high police officers guided the course of events. And at the lowest or operative level, experienced marksmen, recruited from the ranks of the Minutemen and Cuban adventurers, trained and equipped by the ClA, carried out the assassination.
Apart from the obvious overall purpose of ending the Kennedy Administration and opening a new era, prime factors in the conspiracy were the desire to effect a radical change in foreign policy (in particular towards Cuba and in Vietnam) and to preserve specific Texas interests such as the tax privileges enjoyed by the oil industry.
All these aims were attained. Cuba was further isolated through the establishment, with the help of the ClA, of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. The war in Vietnam - which Kennedy had meant to liquidate at the earliest possible moment - was escalated, step by step, into the senseless mass slaughter in progress at the end of 1967. And the oil industry has never had it so good.
Who did Joachim Joesten believe that the John Birch Society join forces with to assassinate John F. Kennedy?
(M9) CIA Report released as a result of the Assassination Records Review Board (1st December, 1966)
A source who has furnished reliable information in the past and who was in Russia on the date of the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy advised on December 4, 1963, that the news of the assassination of President Kennedy was flashed to the Soviet people almost immediately after its occurrence. It was greeted by great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy.
According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the "ultraright" in the United States to effect a "coup." They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it rose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part. They felt those elements interested in utilizing the assassination and playing on anticommunist sentiments in the United States would then utilize this act to stop negotiations with the Soviet Union, attack Cuba and thereafter spread the war. As a result of these feelings, the Soviet Union immediately went into a state of national alert.
Our source further stated that Soviet officials were fearful that without leadership, some irresponsible general in the United States might launch a missile at the Soviet Union. It was the further opinion of the Soviet officials that only maniacs would think that the "left" forces in the United States, as represented by the Communist Party, USA, would assassinate President Kennedy, especially in view of the abuse the Communist Party, USA, has taken from the "ultraleft" as a result of its support of peaceful coexistence and disarmament policies of the Kennedy administration.
Explain what officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed was the reason why John F. Kennedy was assassinated.